'Rather oppressive' That seems grossly inaccurate.
I would describe the communist block in said period as 'rather oppressive'. Most everyone was afraid of the secret police**, dissidents were forced to mine uranium, for example, with inadequate protection. there was no freedom of expression, people like you (not parroting the party line, bourgeois ancestors) were kicked out of their jobs and sent to do manual labour -there's a so-called intelligentsia bridge over Vltava in Prague, built by ex-professionals or business people) ..
1950's US, oppressive? If you were black , sure. White women had no serious problems getting work or being independent. So what they could not choose some careers?
That seems more like middling gender discrimination, not a case of serious oppression..
]]>The Korolev's N1 design was hopelessly flawed. It'd never have worked.
]]>The best argument for mass immigration is to compare ethnically and culturally homogenous countries( Finland, Czech Republic, Norway, Poland) with those that are heterogenous, like the United States, Russia, Malaysia or past countries (19th century Turkey, Austria-Hungaria.)
The former have far higher levels of social tension, higher inequality, worse political climate, higher crime and so on.
]]>^^This. Though I'd limit the parliament eligibility to people capable of scoring respectably above average on some sort of intelligence test. IQ scores can be improved by practice, so even dumb but determined people could get in.
Also, implement partly direct democracy like the Swiss have, -important issues, large expenditures, taxes have to be approved by voters.
Possibly, it'd be a good idea to also hold online voting on paragraphs of laws, where the law-makers would have to convince a randomly selected number of eligible voters that said paragraphs are necessary. They could be renumerated for that, to increase attention.
That could cut down on loopholes for cronies in laws.
Also, more eyeballs spot more bugs, no?
The US House of Representatives is overwhelmingly dominated by folks with law degrees (and this is not wholly inappropriate, given they're in the job of making laws).
It is wholly inappropriate.
Lawyers have a vested interest in laws being as complicated as possible, because that gives them power.
Look at their fokking tax code, for example, or criminal code. No one has even the slightest idea anymore of how many offences there are.
]]>All genius?
And are you really sure?
Because, been demonstrated and replicated that high general intelligence means faster learning and better performance on complex tasks.
Geniuses tend to be way above "high general intelligence".
Quite possible that say Newton, if he were born in the stone age, would've been the guy who invented the bow. By say observing what tree saplings do when tensed and so on..
Unless you're a Spec Ops type and killing people is your business, it would be difficult to use these techniques and not go to jail for assault or manslaughter.
Unless you live in Britain, or some place so crazy that self-defense is a crime, no, you won't go to jail.
Maiming a mugger, or shooting or killing an armed robber isn't generally criminal, unless it looks iffy.
]]>@DJP O'Kane Anecdotes schmanecdotes. How many science nobels have been awarded to people of black African origin, eh? Also, the dimmest Kenyans never get to Europe.. BTW, I've read about education system in the UK, and abolishing selective grammar schools is the biggest crock of shit I can imagine.
I went to one, and I actually enjoyed attending school where there were few morons or bullies.
It's the same with Chinese, the mostly the smart ones went to the US, and if you look at their level of achievment it's far beyond that of white Americans.
@RDSouth Tinkering with genes of children will be seen and labelled as eugenics. Even if it'll be post-birth ..
I'm not an individualist, I am a collectivist who thinks we should bring back the Soviet Union (but do it properly this time). The Chinese already did that. A bit thick, are we?
]]>Coercing stupid into not having children can be thought of as immoral. Then, 1) world's already overpopulated 2) you can't expect people to voluntarily do the right thing
Society practicing it could declare that the greater good is above individual freedoms. Chinese do so with their one child policy.
I imagine you'd also fulminate if someone proposed to build a nuclear power plant near your house, presumably because it'd negatively impact your property value.
Individualists like you are ruining the modern world.
After all, we can see how societies where people are apparently less bright because of enviromental or possibly genetic reasons are worse off.
Same goes for places with high lead levels- that decreases intelligence and causes aggression.
"No idea, but we certainly used to hang children for petty theft." [citation needed]
That's because you're an idiot. Uh-huh. I prefer being called a nazi, which is what Americans trot out if I clam to consider any eugenics a good idea-it's less incorrect, even though I'm neither nacionalist nor socialist.
]]>Their leaders already apparently condone selling political prisoners off for organs.
Chinese already practice coercive population control policies. Even if you considered it from the wussy Christian perspective, something like that wouldn't be much worse.
And for the record, I don't consider eugenics immoral?
]]>http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=3741
We have two distinct problem solving approaches, once is interpersonal(emotional) the other rational, it seems. The emotional one is easily exploited, and using it makes you more humane but more gullible.
People who operate purely in the other one are often considered callous assholes...
]]>Farming societies can also have more specialization..
Therefore, I'd suggest again that there's no way for humans to become smarter.
What about eugenic programmes? Chinese could certainly implement a programme where the bottom third of men, intellectually speaking wouldn't be able to legally procreate.
Could have a big impact over several generations.
Then there's intelligence. Ashkenazi Jews have a very high average verbal IQ and suffer from a host of brain-related genetic diseases. Which implies there are genes that control for intelligence, which means it's going to be possible to change it either pre-natally or in adults by using say, retroviruses.
If it did, there wouldn't be negative correlations between intelligence and fertility, would there? Those negative correlations are strictly modern age. It was the other way around during before the modern era and specifically before the advent of the welfare state.
IQ correlates pretty well with income, up to 130 or so (98th percentile). There's little reason to believe it as that different in past times..
Obviously, due to resource constraints, wealthy people could feed their progeny better and have more of them. Which they did.
It's one of the speculated reason for Ashkenazi intelligence, because they were for centuries restricted to purely intellectual professions.
To loosely translate on of my great-grandmother's saying: even dogs die from easy living..
]]>Chinese or Japanese or other Asians aren't white either, yet are no pushovers, intellectually speaking. No matter what kind of dreadful history their ancestors have endured.
What I wrote is that since everyone except sub-saharan Africans(by that I mean blacks, that is Bantu, Khoisan etc) has 1-2% neanderthal admixture, and because there's good reason to believe neanderthals thought differently -different group size, different and harsher enviroment and evolved separately for cca ~600K years, it's possible that that admixture caused the resulting somewhat-mutts to think a little differently.
Anyway, the issue is not really on topic, so I'll leave it be.
On topic, I think Charlie's idea is nice, but found wanting. I mean, who's gonna utilize a meme better, a stupid or a smart person?
The stupid person may perhaps succeed at outright aping the originator, the smarter one will eventually take the good parts and discard what doesn't apply.
So there.
You can hardwire any primal desire system you want into them from the outset. How many people fight their basic drives? Most just accept them as an end in themselves and everything else is negotiable as a means. "The three laws (or whatever) is me. I was born this way. Why would I want to change it?" So then, you'd be okay with creating a human-derived slave race which would just love to obey and work for their creators and masters? It's okay as long as they can live in accord with their nature right?
Just curious.
Nice somewhat relevant quote from IMO one of the SF strategy games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=U_hrYz_2uAk#t=49s
(Master of Orion 2 is tied with it IMO.. has better gameplay but worse story/presentation)
]]>I do believe the Black Egyptians theory has been thoroughly thrashed.
I think the more likely explanation for "Africans are not mathematicians" is a combination of the slave trade and then about 200 years of colonial exploitation by European imperialists. What about the British Raj? Doesn't count? I mean, British presence in India caused a number of famines and such and cannot be described honestly as 'beneficial'.
But we (and by "we" I mean first the beneficiaries of the slave trade and then the European colonial powers) systematically held back their development by somewhere between 200 and 600 years during the last millennium. To their misfortune, they were behind the times, where social development is concerned.
Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel gives a plausible reason for the delay, namely the problem of borrowing workable memes from places with similar climate, because Africa is north/south oriented..
It seems to me that you(beneficiaries of the slave trade and people whose ancestors lived in colonial powers) were just the last in a series of misfortunes.
]]>There's a pod of dolphins which teaches their young to use tools, specifically some kind of sea sponge to better find fish on the bottom..
http://www.livescience.com/21989-dolphin-sponge-tools-culture.html
]]>On complex tasks, such as being chief, farmer, engineer etc, general intelligence correlates very well with performance. On simple tasks, not so much.
And there's also evidence (but not so good one) that it has increased over time. I've read persuasive articles stating that during the middle ages, able people were better farmers and got ahead in society, which meant they left more inheritance and better-fed offspring, and that combined with enviromental pressures such as lack of extra space pushed the average intelligence higher. Same thing could've happened in China, Japan, India.. etc.
So, why should it completely disappear.. the pressure?
And if so, is it possible that at some point, another species might develop language (and thus the ability to transfer memes/behavioural traits horizontally) from such a base and be fundamentally smarter than we are? Why not?
@Charles H
According to DNA research, everyone except sub-saharan Africans has some neanderthal admixture.
Who, on the other hand have similar levels of hominid admixture speculated to come from some other species..
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/09/africans-arent-pure-humans-either/
Certain autistic people have speculated that this admixture is what gave people outside of Africa some kind of crucial edge, for example in abstract thinking.
One theory is that neanderthals were not good at symbolic, language-oriented thinking and were instead visual thinkers like some autistic people See: http://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html
There's some anecdotal support here. For example, wikipedia page for African mathematicians lists 3 of them. Indian mathematicians, who are drawn from a roughly similar population number ~130 or so.
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